Backing up is not hard to do

When some employees at FCM Travel Solutions lost their laptops over the past year, they were able to get their data back within half an hour.

“People were really happy with the kind of support they were getting, as there are not many technical people in our industry,” says Surender Arora, head of IT at FCM Travel Solutions in India. “It was like a miracle and was something they had never expected.”

By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers.

You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

That FCM’s employees thought that they would still be able access the data they thought they had lost says a lot about the state of adoption of backup and recovery processes in organisations, especially among small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

Today, there’s an abundance of software that makes it easier to back up data to the cloud or to an on-premise datacentre. Gone are the days when administrators had to go around initiating backups – the process can now be automated using a slew of backup and recovery tools.

Earlier this year, FCM put a stop to inefficient, manual backups using USB drives and recovery media, and turned to Commvault’s backup and recovery software to automate and manage its data management processes. At the same time, it also moved data from over 1,000 employee devices to the cloud.

The result: data backup and restoration times were slashed by up to 70%, enhancing awareness and visibility of data storage and improving FCM’s ability to recover quickly and completely.

Surender says FCM had also been able to back up data over a wide area network, particularly for data hosted on cloud-based systems that reside on Amazon Web Services. The Commvault software also adheres to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), giving FCM peace of mind when it comes to security and compliance, Surender says.

But backup and recovery is only the first step. Organisations should also encrypt their data to make any stolen or lost data unreadable and unusable. Backups should also be tested on a regularly basis, and scanned for vulnerabilities that could be exploited by pesky hackers.

How have you been protecting your data from prying eyes or recovering business-critical information in the event of a disaster? Tell us more in the comments!